DOE Invests $125 Million in Synthetic Life to Develop Biofuels

The U.S. Department of Energy has committed $125 million to an aggressive effort called Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI, pronounced Jay Bay), that will develop fuels from plant material. It’s a five-year partnership between three national laboratories and three universities.

Working at a central lab facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, researchers will create new forms of life that will produce ethanol with unprecedented efficiency. This field of science — synthetic biology — will be used to make crops that are extremely tough and productive. Optimized plants will push the limit of fuel production per acre of land. The same laboratory techniques will be used to design organisms that convert plant material into fuel in the most cost-effective manner possible.

Biodiesel and ethanol are currently the two leading types of liquid biofuel. Ethanol can be blended with gasoline to make a somewhat clean-burning fuel called E85.

Fermenting sugar is the easiest part of making ethanol. Humanity has been adept at this for millennia, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Most microbes die when the alcohol concentration in a tank gets too high. Stronger microbes will be able to work longer and possibly break down a wider variety of substances to make fuel.

Brazil is far ahead of the United States in biofuel production. In Brazil, ethanol is easy to make because the juice of sugarcane crops can be directly fermented. Many crops in the United States are low in sugar but very high in the carbohydrate cellulose, which must be turned into fermentable sugar. That transformation is a costly and expensive process. Researchers at JBEI will design new organisms and enzymes to convert cellulose to sugar as efficiently as possible.

For quite a while, the Joint Genome Institute, in Walnut Creek, California, has been actively sequencing the genomes of microbes and insects that are adept at converting cellulose to sugar. JGI has also sequenced the genomes of plants that produce large amounts of cellulose. Researchers at the new BioEnergy center may use the information gathered JGI as a starting point to overcome each of the three sugar production bottlenecks — sustainable agriculture, improved fermentation, and efficient breakdown of cellulose to sugar.

Jay Keasling, the head of the new center, says it will be run like a startup company and will partner with industry.

The institute will be in the West Berkeley Biocenter — a building central to all six partners, Stanford, Berkeley, U.C. Davis, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. It will eventually lease a larger facility in the same area.

Earlier this year, the energy giant BP gave $500 million to Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley lab, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for similar alternative energy research. That gift will fund the Energy Biosciences Institute, which will operate separately from the JBEI.